Trump’s post-conviction windfall shows democracy is increasingly a pay-to-play game

By Daniel Drache, York University, Canada, Marc D. Froese, Burman University

In the hours immediately following Donald Trump’s recent hush-money conviction in a Manhattan courtroom, his presidential campaign raked in US$53 million from small donors.

Why are regular people without deep pockets throwing so much money at a convicted felon? In the United States today, as in many other countries with a populism problem, money is both the cause and consequence of broken political systems.

Modern democracy has a money problem everywhere. As democracy becomes a pay-to-play game, trust in the system breaks down and political tribalism becomes the only way to win. We throw money at our candidates because cold cash is the only form of speech that makes a difference.

But even in places where democracy has not yet fallen off a cliff, all-powerful billionaires, broken political parties and angry voters are moving into destructive alignment. As pessimism and anger pile up across the globe, we must brace for far-reaching consequences.

The billionaires’ playbook

Billionaires from Hyderabad to Houston demand three things from their national governments: low taxes to protect their fortunes, preferential treatment for their businesses and the political influence to decide public policy on issues that matter to all of us.

Gabriel Zucman, a U.S. tax authority, has shown that the very rich pay less tax than the average American worker. Their effective tax rate has fallen from 56 per cent on incomes above a million dollars in the 1960s to just 23 per cent in 2018.

As governmental checks on wealth accumulation have gone out the window, the number of ultra-rich has doubled. There are now about 2,700 billionaires in the world. And the share of money they control has grown from under $1 trillion in 2000 to more than $14 trillion today.

In India, for example, inequality today is worse than it was under British colonial rule.

Politicians have welcomed this big money into party politics.

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